Terry Gilliam

Time Bandits (Special Edition 2 Disc Set)
$14.98
Early in Terry Gilliam's TIME BANDITS, Napoleon Bonaparte (Ian Holm) laughs at a command performance of Punch and Judy among the burning ruins of Castiglione, approving of the show's littleness and its violence. This might be a good characterization of TIME BANDITS itself, which takes quite a lot of delight in both rowdiness and littleness (the six title characters are all little people, and the film itself breaks down into small eisodes that don't integrate well together). The film has some of the most beautiful art direction of any time, and yet despite its beauty it doesn't cohere at all--it has almost no plot, and the mjor characters are less than one-dimensional since you can't hang even the most basic descriptors onto the central child, his parents, or his thieving cohort. Some of the sequences are miraculous in their beauty: in particular the Mycenae episode, with Sean Connery as Agamemnon, which is so perfectly realized that you almost want to weep that Terry Gilliam never directed a full-scale ancient Greek epic film. Others just don't work at all, particularly the heroes' fight at the end with the Evil Being (nicely played by David Warner), where Gilliam seems to have bit off more than he can chew. The whole thing must have been at least inspired, oddly enough, by the famous sequence of the young boy encountering the dwarf circus troupe in Bergman's THE SILENCE, a sequence which called out for further imitation and elucidation. The color transfer of the Gilliam film to this Criterion edition is particularly stunning.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (20th Anniversary Edition)
$14.94
One of the craziest films ever made but enjoyable all the time. This is the only movie I've ever seen where Uma Thurman really looks terrific. A rather confusing plot that jogs along with pure entertainment. You'll like it.

12 Monkeys (Special Edition)
$12.98
Science Fiction with time travel and deadly world of germs actually keeps your attention. This is a film that features Bruce Willis (as time traveler from the year 2035) and Brad Pitt (an insane son of a rich influential scientist).

The movie works on all fronts despite a bizarre plot. Terry Cole (Bruce Willis) is a prisoner in the year 2035, where all earthlings must live underground to escape a deadly plague on the earth's surface. Terry is asked to travel back in time to the month before the germs were released and try to change the future. He ends up in a insane asylum in 1990 the first trip. His psychiatrist, Katherine Railly and a friendly inmate Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) are his main contacts and he feels that they may help him find the clues to the epidemic that killed 5 billion people in 1997.

Original intrigue keeps the audience interested and involved with the surprise ending. Food for thought in our time of worry about pandemics.

Lost in La Mancha
$29.95
I know directors will go a long way to achieve their visions sometimes, but starving horses half to death for a movie? There are two nearly skeletal white horses in this film who pathetically lick the bottom of an empty feed bin looking for food. Terry Gilliam first chuckles his delight that their ribs show so prominently that he won't have to use makeup on them. Then he chastises them for seeking nourishment. Then he saddles one of them up and has an actor ride it all day. Does anybody watching this movie really think this is okay? In America he would be up on charges of animal cruelty. Maybe in Europe it's art, but not here. Shame on him and shame on anyone who thinks it okay to starve animals for any reason. I give this movie one star because all I will ever remember is how angry it made me.